Concerto for Pencilina and Sewer Flute

Wacky instruments often resemble bad plumbing, but all are welcome in the eclectic light orchestra of experimental music

Listen! The halls are alive with the sound of hardware. And
contraptions like Car Horn Organs, Photon Clarinets, Pneumaphones
and Gravikords. In workshops across the country, mad musical
inventors are thumbing their noses at eons of musical tradition,
tuning up mutant instruments and making music that can be merely
weird, but is more often whimsical, even mystifying. Such
experimenting is as old as music itself; instruments have come and
gone and come again.

In
1761, Ben Franklin invented his glass harmonica, 37 glass bowls
played by rubbing wet fingers on the rims. The glass harmonica
enthralled Europe, but by the early 1800s it had vanished from
concert halls. Today, however, glass instruments are coming back.
In the 1930s, the Theremin  one of the first electronic
instruments  was played by 700 professionals; within a few years,
alas, it had all but disappeared. Perhaps you havent heard of the
Theremin, but you have heard it. You just didn't recognize it as
anything from this part of the solar system. Its eerie,
oooh-weee-ooooo musical-saw-like sounds accompanied the
science-fiction film The Day The Earth Stood Still and the
Beach Boys' classic tune "Good Vibrations."

Many
of today's new instruments are as much sculptures as they are music
makers; one is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent
collection. Some innovators, like Peter Schickele, design their
creations to be a "scherzo," Italian for "joke." Others shun whimsy
and view their experiments as a means of questioning the line
between "music" and "noise." A few visionaries have turned their
instrument-making into careers, and one of them hit the jackpot. In
1997, an inventor named Trimpin (he refuses to divulge his first
name) won a $280,000 MacArthur Fellowship.